Biotech titan Monsanto has made significant advances in the development of herbicide-tolerant wheat, the company announced recently, and could have the first-of-its-kind crop ready for farming in just a few years’ time.

Genetically-modified wheat isn’t legally approved anywhere in the
world, but the billion-dollar St. Louis, Missouri-based
agriculture company has for years been determined to develop the
first GMO variety of the cash crop. Now Monsanto’s chief technology
officer thinks the company is on the right track with regards to
research.

Monsanto’s GMO wheat-in-progress is among 29 endeavors being
undertaken by the group to have made “phase advancements”
recently, company reps said in a conference call last week, and
testing has advanced from the “proof of concept” stage to early
development.

Monsanto-made wheat, like other GMO crops created by the company,
would be resistant to their weed killer Roundup and thus join the
likes of other “Roundup Ready” products already sold by the
company, including bioengineered soybean and corn.

“From an overall market perspective, the grain industry and
the wheat industry — specifically the wheat trade industry — has
remained very interested and supportive of biotech
advances,” Monsanto CTO Robb Fraley said during last week’s
call, according to
Baking Business reporter Eric Schroeder.

“A wheat farmer generally is also a corn and soybean farmer,
and they understand the benefits of the technology, and the wheat
industry has watched the benefits that this technology has
brought to both corn and soybeans. And so we continue to make
advances,” added Schroeder.

According to the company’s top technologist, though, GMO wheat
would likely not be reality until a couple of years down the
road.

“We are still several years away from a product launch, but
it is nice to see those products in the pipeline,” Fraley
added.

Indeed, Monsanto has actually spent the better part of a
decade-and-a-half researching GMO wheat. The company began field
testing a variety starting in 1998, but suspended operations in
2005 after determining that a super-wheat strain wasn’t quite
ready to be launched.

As RT reported
last week, Monsanto also recently announced that sales of its
Roundup Ready soybean grew 16 percent during the quarter ending
November 30, 2013.

Piper Jaffray Cos analyst Michael Cos told
Bloomberg News at the time that Monsanto’s GMO soybean
“will prove to be the single most important earnings
driver” for the company during the course of the next two
years. According to Fraley’s assessment, though, the company
could be nearly completion on its GMO wheat by then.

Should Monsanto stay on track, however, they’ll still have to
worry about the restrictions currently in place in the United
States and abroad against GMO wheat. The company became the
centerpiece of a biotech scandal last year when remnants of old
biotech wheat turned up on an Oregon
farm practically a decade after Monsanto supposedly stopped
testing the crop. After those reports circulated, a government
official for Japan’s farm ministry placed an embargo
on all US wheat.

Many others countries outside the US have banned GMO imports, and
China
recently refused no fewer than five shipments of American corn
allegedly over concerns it could have been tainted by a biotech
variety of the crop.